How I participated in National Deep Dish Pizza day without guilt

Today was National Deep Dish Pizza day. To celebrate, I ordered a deep dish pizza from Zachary’s Chicago Pizza, a local Bay Area pizza restaurant. Zachary’s has been open since 1983 and is 100% employee owned. There are five locations in the Bay Area and their pizza is oh so delicious! I can only vouch for their deep dish pizza though. I love deep dish pizza so I never bothered trying anything else. My favorite pizza from there is the Stuffed Zachary’s Special. The Special comes with sausage, onion, bell pepper, and mushrooms. I have them add pepperoni to the pizza. Are you hungry yet?

So, enough talk about pizza.  Let’s address the bigger question on people’s minds when they saw my post on Instagram about me having deep dish Chicago style pizza.

 “How is someone who just wrote a book about losing 100 pounds eating something as rich as deep dish pizza? Won’t she gain all that weight back?”

Well, I count macros, therefore I can eat what I want as long as I stay within my macro count. Here is a breakdown of my daily macros that I’m currently allowed:

• 1,951 calories
• 182 grams of carbs
• 67 grams of fat
• 155 grams of protein

Throughout the day, I keep track of the amount of carbs, fat, and protein in everything that I ingest. When I have Zachary’s pizza, I will enjoy one and half pieces of a large Stuffed Zachary’s Special. The pieces are large so one and a half is plenty for me. I will record my dinner first and build my daily macro intake around that. The pizza is 55.5g of carbs, 32g of fat, and 26g of protein. As you can calculate, that pizza dinner takes up about half of my daily fat allotment, but I still have plenty of carbs and protein left for the day.  So I know that means my breakfast, lunch, and snacks will mostly be lower fat and higher carb and protein.  I’m a visual learner, so let’s break that down by meal so that you can see what I ate for the day to make my pizza dinner possible.

For breakfast, I am a creature of habit.  I eat the same thing every morning.  Do I have to? No.  I choose to because I love my breakfast that much!  Every morning, I will have 170g of 0% fat Fage Greek yogurt, 5 raspberries, 30 grams of blueberries, and 45 grams of Nature Valley’s crumbled protein granola.  This breakfast is 33g of carbs, 5.3g of fat, and 26.9g of protein.  With almost 27g of protein, this is a great breakfast that will satisfy your appetite for three to four hours.  At breakfast I also had two gummie multi-vitamins.  That adds 4g of carbs to my breakfast.

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Let’s move on to lunch.  I had 127g of Tyson’s Panko Chicken nuggets (this is one and a half servings), 85g of Ore Ida’s Golden Crinkle Fries, 17g of Organic Heinz Ketchup, and a 20 ounce bottle of Isopure Zero Carb Lemonade Protein Water.  This lunch is 35g of carbs, 22.5g of fat, and 59g of protein.  At first glance, the amount of food in this lunch doesn’t look like much, but with 59g of protein, you will stay full for hours.

Next up is a late afternoon snack.  I chose to have 29g of some Double Good Kettle popcorn (one serving) and 50g of chicken breast that was cooked in the Instant Pot.  This snack was 20g of carbs, 7.8g of fat, and 16.5g of protein.

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We already discussed the macros for dinner, so let’s go to my evening snack.  I had 24g of a Dave’s Killer Bread Cinnamon Raisin Organic bagel (that’s one fourth of a bagel), toasted, with 5g of Trader Joe’s Speculoos Crunchy Cookie Butter (if you have never tried this, get up and go to Trader Joe’s right now to get some!) on it with 50g of a honeycrisp apple on the side. I also had a cup of decaf coffee with one teaspoon of sugar and one tablespoon of International Delight Cold Stone Sweet Cream Coffee Creamer.  I was still in need of 23g of protein so I added two scoops of Vital Proteins Collagen Peptides to my coffee.  The powder provide me with 18g of protein.

At the end of the day, I ended up eating the following:

• 1,946 calories (I left five calories on the table)
• 180g of carbs (I left 2g of carbs on the table)
• 72g of fat (I went over by 5g. I’m only supposed to go over by two if I go over.)
• 150g of protein (I left 5g on the table)

Outside of the decaf coffee and the protein water, I only drink sparkling water and still water for the rest of the day. It just isn’t worth to drink calories because it doesn’t fill you up. Granted, this day is not a representative of my daily food intake (was there even a vegetable in there??). This was just a layout of how I can eat something that might otherwise seem off limits, and still stay on target with my weight loss/maintenance.

Counting macros has been life changing for me and has given me the freedom to enjoy anything I want, in moderation, without the guilt. The most important part in understanding them is knowing how to count them and make them fit your personal lifestyle. The proof is in the pudding that it works. I have been following this lifestyle for 437 days, according to MyFitnessPal, and have had plenty of pizza days and still lost 100 pounds in that time. I recently created an ebook, “The Weight is Over: How I lost 100 pounds after the age of 45”, to help guide people through all the steps I used on my journey. You can grab a copy from the shop page in case you have not already had a chance to get your copy. Until the next post, be well my friends and remember to always be true to yourself.